When prototyping new code I often leave a web browser with thesaurus.com open in the background. It may sound pedantic, but I sometimes find it very useful when deciding what name to use for a class, or what verb to use for a method name. Well-versed code is easy to understand; each class’s name defines its role in the application, and each method’s name describes what the function it performs.
One bad example, which has bugged me for a long time, can be found in Visual Studio. Visual Studio can automatically generate a method stub for you to handle an event. These methods are named after the object that raises the event, and the name of the event, with an underscore between them.
For example, to handle the Click event of a button called SaveButton, the following method stub would be generated:
void SaveButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e){ ...} This method’s name describes the circumstances under which it gets called, not what it actually does. Methods are supposed to do things. Just because it’s an event handler doesn’t mean the rules no longer apply. Where’s the verb here?
I would propose changing it to generate code that looks like this instead:
void HandleSaveButtonClick(object sender, EventArgs e){ ...} This example is just as consistent (in fact it actually conforms a lot closer to the .NET naming guidelines), and it describes what the method does — it handles a SaveButton Click event.
